Taiwan Today

Artificial intelligence supports physical infrastructure in Taiwan’s preparations for extreme weather events.

Tropical cyclones form over water and draw in air with a high moisture content from a large area. They then concentrate water content into rainfall over a much smaller area. This may cause hours or days of extremely heavy rain over land which leads to flooding.

In summer 2025 Typhoon Danas brought prolonged rainfall to the plains of southwestern Taiwan. Some areas received meters of rain in a week, as much as their annual precipitation levels. The extreme weather damaged power lines, causing outages to thousands of premises. In response, the Legislative Yuan swiftly passed a special statute on postdisaster reconstruction work allocating a NT$60 billion (US$1.98 billion) budget, in addition to existing resources authorized by the Disaster Prevention and Protection Act.

The quick response can be traced to lessons learned from Typhoon Morakot, which hit Taiwan in 2009 and marked a turning point for the government in preparation and response to major natural disasters. The torrential rainfall caused flooding along central and southern Taiwan’s Gaoping River, overwhelming levees and washing away vital bridges over the country’s second longest waterway. “It was a huge shock to the infrastructure construction sector,” said Wu Ray-shyan (吳瑞賢), professor of civil engineering at National Central University in Taoyuan City. Wu also heads the Slopeland and Hydrology Division at the New Taipei City-based National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction (NCDR), a body under the supervision of the Cabinet-level National Science and Technology Council (NSTC). The lessons from Morakot in harnessing special statutes for postdisaster reconstruction; upgrading flood prevention in roads, bridges and other infrastructure; and increasing emphasis on social resilience were taken seriously. “When a disaster occurs, we must minimize the harm it causes,” Wu said.

Sliding Scale
The Ministry of Economic Affairs Water Resources Agency (WRA) Deputy Director General Wang Yi-fung (王藝峰) said, “Climate change and resultant heavy rainfall have added manifold risks like landslide and rockfall, which pose challenges to traditional flood control models reliant on large-scale construction projects.” Strengthening community-based flood preparation systems has resulted in 572 villages prepared for evacuation by 1,483 volunteers trained by city and county governments across the country. The WRA cited villages in Tainan City’s Houbi District and Pingtung County’s Fangliao Township, both in southern Taiwan, where evacuation and action by volunteers mitigated event severity during the 2024 typhoon season.

Tracing the development of the country’s flood defenses, Wang explained that early attempts during the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945) concentrated on protecting a small administrative and merchant area in Taipei City by building flood barricades along part of the Tamsui River. In 1963 Typhoon Gloria triggered the expansion of flood control for the greater Taipei area, with focus on management of the Keelung River that flows through Taipei, New Taipei and Keelung cities as a tributary of the Tamsui River. Ten years later the Executive Yuan launched a comprehensive flood control project for Taipei that emphasized straightening the section of the Keelung River that meandered through the Taipei districts of Nangang, Neihu and Songshan. Research started in 1981 and reconstruction started in 1991, taking five years to shorten the waterway by 5.3 kilometers. Reclaimed land became parks, housing, new roads and public facilities shielding the eastern district of Taipei by high levees.

Since the 1980s there have been flood control projects around 25 other river systems across the country, including the Gaoping and Zhuoshui Rivers, the latter being the nation’s longest waterway. These have encompassed embankment and floodway construction, dredging at the conjunction of main rivers with tributaries, floodgate installation and landslide riverbank control. Dozens of other smaller waterways under local administration have been allocated funding from the WRA and other central government units since the 2000s to improve drainage systems in flood-prone or low-lying areas.

After the promulgation of the Disaster Prevention and Protection Act in 2000, bodies like the WRA’s Water Disaster Mitigation Division were established at all levels, as it stipulates the assignment of full-time staff to execute disaster prevention and rescue work for local residents. “In the past, usually a taskforce was formed temporarily for these jobs,” Wang explained. The act mandates use of specialized technology, he added, such as the WRA inundation warning by rainfall amount online system. This 2009 application collects precipitation data every 10 minutes from more than 1,200 hydrometric stations operating across the country and compares it to previous flood records. The data activates cautionary texts sent to 367 townships, township-level cities and city districts, including those on offshore islands, so that local authorities can take protective measures such as placing over 2,700 small and medium-sized portable water pumps where they will be most effective. Information is also accessible to the general public through text messages and is available on platforms including the WRA website, mobile app and Google Maps.

Precipitation Prescience
The WRA’s online warning system is enriched by data from more than 2,000 flood sensor devices, typically set up on roadsides, as well as over 10,000 fixed and mobile closed-circuit television units working in all corners of the nation. Image recognition software assisted by artificial intelligence (AI) helps process the data. This year AI technology was applied to forecasting rising water levels in the Zhuoshui, Bazhang and Zengwen rivers in southern Taiwan. Wang anticipates that by 2026 projection mapping for potential inundations will come online. “By skipping the physical model and adopting a deep learning approach driven by hydrological and meteorological data input, we can predict and simulate upsurge and inundation up to three hours prior to the event with an accuracy in excess of 75 percent,” he said, citing the huge Central Weather Administration (CWA) database as the vital information resource used to shape WRA’s AI models.

To acquire meteorological observation data, the CWA and WRA cooperated to install three rainfall detection radar stations in northern, central and southern Taiwan, with two more set up in western and northeastern counties earlier this year. NCDR’s Wu praised the Long-term National Space Technology Development Program for its role in bringing remote weather sensing technology into play. In 2019 the Taiwan Space Agency, based at Hsinchu Science Park, launched Formosat-7 into orbit as a constellation of six advanced climate-monitoring satellites jointly developed by Taiwan and the U.S. In 2023, Taiwan’s first indigenously produced weather satellite, Triton, was sent up, and currently Formosat-8 projects are scheduled for first satellite launch this year. Also known as Wind Hunter, Triton’s wind-speed data provides invaluable intelligence for extreme weather warnings and significantly improves heavy rainfall forecast accuracy in the low-latitude Western Pacific region, where typhoons commonly form before traveling northward on each side of the first island chain.

Collective Challenge
To tackle global warming and resultant extreme weather, government units, state-backed organizations and academic institutions gather a variety of resources into climate response infrastructures. “It’s challenging to craft a common architecture for diverse information stored in differently structured databases,” Wu said. The NCDR has been working to integrate these and, as a result, in 2009 launched the NSTC-funded Taiwan Climate Change Projection Information and Adaptation Knowledge Platform (TCCIP) to facilitate cross-sector cooperation on climate-related research and data acquisition to support national policy frameworks.

The TCCIP has built contacts with international organizations including Japan’s Center for Climate Change Adaptation and the Climate Service Center Germany in such fields as climate data service, impact assessment and adaptation analysis. “Higher latitude countries like Germany are experienced in dealing with storm surge disasters caused by coastal floods and rising sea levels, which are now also a growing problem for Taiwan,” the WRA’s Wang said. The agency regularly hosts international forums, and this year’s edition saw lecturers from Hamburg University of Technology and the Foundation of River and Basin Integrated Communications in Tokyo share expertise and views on river basin management and smart technology-assisted disaster prevention. “International outreach carries equal weight to other elements of our workstream,” Wang said. “Climate change response requires collective capture and exchange of experiences and solutions from around the world.”

Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw